|
Alien is one of the best, most profoundly original Science Fiction films ever made. It will never stop being scary. I just watched Aliens for the first time and don't understand the hype! It's like every horror and ambiguity from the first one is answered by an inversely stupid action moment, explosion of goo, or character whomst is not very engaging. Fear of death and vulnerability is at the heart of alien, characters are greedy and lazy but deemed no less, ultimately, upon death. Even the robot is frail and human. Most characters in this are chided for and die poetically just deaths due to their lack of detached military bravery, or greedy charlatinism. I liked the new robot though he's ok. Can you imagine if commander data met the alien queen? he'd probably harmonize the bionic frequency and make an attempt to communicate. I guess he did kind of, when he met the borg queen. I also think this is the specific movie starship troopers is making fun of. In conclusion,  Alien Thread!
|
#
?
Jun 8, 2020 23:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 02:25 |
|
|
It's a solid army mans Vs. spacemonster movie. I never really got why it was a sequel to Alien because you could have plugged in any spacemonster and you'd have the same movie. I mean I really like it and think it's great for 80's action, but it makes no sense as an Alien movie. Ps. Alien 3 was a good Alien movie and I think it's funny how people hate it mostly because Fincher went balls out and killed Hicks and Newt, mostly.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 01:36
|
|
|
Frankenstyle posted:It's a solid army mans Vs. spacemonster movie. I never really got why it was a sequel to Alien because you could have plugged in any spacemonster and you'd have the same movie. I mean I really like it and think it's great for 80's action, but it makes no sense as an Alien movie. I think Aliens is great because it takes up the classic Horror Movie Fridge Question, "Why don't the heroes just call the cops (or in this case the space marines)" and answer it by firmly telling the audience "The monster would slaughter them just as easily as it did the normal people, people a cop/soldier/whatever authority figure does not actually make you capable of handling a horror monster." It doesn't handle the genre shift from horror to raw action as well as Terminator 2 did, but I think it works.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 01:43
|
|
|
If we ignore absolutely all the subtext, just actively repress that poo poo, then these could make p. good toys
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 02:07
|
|
|
Sanguinia posted:I think Aliens is great because it takes up the classic Horror Movie Fridge Question, "Why don't the heroes just call the cops (or in this case the space marines)" and answer it by firmly telling the audience "The monster would slaughter them just as easily as it did the normal people, people a cop/soldier/whatever authority figure does not actually make you capable of handling a horror monster."
It's not unrealistic in that regard, but being real if anyone took Ripley even half-seriously they would be sending drone scouts and either nuking the site or relying on robots to scoop the fuckers up. And before you go "   " bear in-mind we're assuming a baseline level of competence at the administrative level to look at budget reports and PR costs and deciding "yeah sure these ops have to be remote because the instant we introduce humans into the mix poo poo will go bananas that's why we want them as bio-weapons."
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 02:14
|
|
|
mind the walrus posted:That's not really the case though. The movie goes out of its way to stack the deck in favor of the Aliens: This is all fair enough, but isn't the fact that despite ostensibly really wanting the Aliens for their own ends that Weyland-Utani still accidentally engineers a situation which is incredibly stacked in their favor out of apathy, laziness, greed and general negligence... you know, the point? Granted, it takes that characterization from the original movie to borderline parodic/farcical extremes, but it does the job.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 02:28
|
|
|
Sanguinia posted:Granted, it takes that characterization from the original movie to borderline parodic/farcical extremes, but it does the job. I was shocked that they slimy business guy from Avatar, was also in the Aliens movie. I would almost believe it was the same actor, if I didn't know better
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 03:01
|
|
|
mind the walrus posted:That's not really the case though. The movie goes out of its way to stack the deck in favor of the Aliens: You could just as easily say "Are we to believe people who routinely don and doff hazard suits that allow them to survive in space don't have the baseline competency in decontamination and then quarantine?" about the first movie. Like there's a certain degree of "Yes, if the <central conflict> or key events that led to it didn't happen the way they did this story wouldn't have happened" baked into any fiction. I also don't think "fictional megacorp is evil and views all the characters you see as utterly expendable. This is one jr executive's attempt at making a name for themselves, that others are willing to let fail or succeed" is the smug interpretation that require stretching credulity. How long was the US in Afghanistan and Iraq before they bothered making their vehicles not death traps? Or bothered sending over body armor? You know as part of those forever wars we're still in, and still wasting trillions on? Surely within 3 presidential administrations there'd be some baseline level of competence at the administrative level where they'd look at budget reports and PR costs.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 03:05
|
|
|
Again-- not saying the framing was unrealistic or that it didn't serve a theme, I'm just saying that the conceit of human incompetence is the reason the monsters are threatening, not the monsters themselves.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 03:21
|
|
|
Frankenstyle posted:It's a solid army mans Vs. spacemonster movie. I never really got why it was a sequel to Alien because you could have plugged in any spacemonster and you'd have the same movie. I mean I really like it and think it's great for 80's action, but it makes no sense as an Alien movie. I still don't get why Hicks and Newt are so popular.
|
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 03:25
|
|
|
Ah totally cool, and I getcha, I thought you were saying it was unbelievable levels of human incompetence or corporate callousness not that it was a much bigger factor than just the aliens being scary or strong. Going back to the OP I really think the t2 comparison is pretty apt, and I'd love to hear from someone who has no real concept of where the Terminator franchise went see t2 after really loving the first. MonsieurChoc posted:I still don't get why Hicks and Newt are so popular. Alien 3 was also one of those monkey paw movies, where at the time everyone said "That's really not how things should have ended.." when in hindsight Ripley sacrificing herself to kill the last alien really would've been the far better place for the series to end. Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Jun 9, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 03:28
|
|
|
Coolness Averted posted:I think the griping is specifically because it happens offscreen. It just feels a bit like cheating when you rob the survivors of their prize casually in backstory. Like sure, bring them back or even kill them off in the first scene to establish the spooky monster is back. It also makes Ripley's victory in the previous movies that much more hollow. That's probably largely intentional, but audiences rooting for characters usually don't like when a franchise practically retroactively undoes their accomplishments without much gravity. And I mean... come on. The Last Jedi should be studied as case one from now on in why you can't expect to gently caress with an audience looking for a shallow crowd-pleaser and get away with it--even if you pull off the arc, a lot of people are going to hate you on principle anyway. mind the walrus fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jun 9, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jun 9, 2020 03:50
|
|
|
Things in aliens favor: -Good score, the 2001 bits at the beginning and end were a nice touch -Lighting was very good. I like that the crew looks like they know what they're doing, despite much of the beginning looking like spaceballs -Alien queen scene, similarly neat, any movie that could be really bad from the 80s is usually saved by a good puppet. HOWEVER, severe knock for using lenses that make actors appear much wider. Sigourney's head looks like tiny face mitt romney, which is also a thing i think starship troopers is cinematically making fun of, conspicuously using a more human lookin lens in the one scene where a character cries when rico is dead
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2020 01:09
|
|
|
Alien was a very distinctive and well-done take on a standard slasher movie. Aliens was a very distinctive and well-done take on a Vietnam war movie.
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2020 01:13
|
|
|
Here's my review of Aliens: it fuckin whips rear end
|
|
#
?
Jun 10, 2020 20:49
|
|
|
Alien: This is why we think of Ridley Scott as being capable of greatness You play through Alien Isolation, and you remember why the visuals stick with you, and what a good job the production crew did at creating a "space trucking" spaceship. You see the extremely realistic overlapping dialog, all the attempts at realism, and then a fuckin' parasite monster rips out of Winston's chest (that guy really doesn't have much luck.) The music is really good, too; I've no idea who did it but good job Aliens: This is where James Cameron proved Terminator was not just him ripping off a short story by Harlan Ellison. It's weird, that in terms of cultural impact for nerds like us, Aliens was the movie that launched a thousand (drop)ships - space marines, fighting One weird recovered memory I just had: there used to be a cable station when I was growing up that like most stations would edit for content, and I think they might use this more liberally than they were intended, because the first time I saw Aliens, it was this weird hybrid combining parts of different cuts: They extended the bits with the space marines (like in between first finding the nest and Bishop seeing the emergency venting, there's like a extra night of battle that shows the marines setting up and using these auto guns, that also does a lot to explain why the marine number goes from 20+ to like six by the time Bishop sees the venting. I think they extended something else too, possibly Ripley stomping about on her own, trying to rescue Newt e: maybe this is just nostalgia but I think this cut the best
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 01:17
|
|
|
It's an action movie and a drat good one. The climax has a machine gun with a flamethrower taped to it. And it gave us the line 'Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.' Though I haven't watched it in like 10 years. I should fix that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 02:25
|
|
|
Someone try to sell me on the action. I was about to say I didn't like action but then remembered...rubber godzilla, so I think I don't have words for what I found constructively lacking. Besides too much goo and never getting a clear shot of the aliens. Seriously with the goo, I felt like I was at the kids choice awards
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 04:25
|
|
|
The action in Aliens is more in how much mileage they get out of the sets and costumes and tension of knowing how bad the marines are hosed. Remember a lot of this stuff was really new/novel, especially in a movie. It's still the modern benchmark for a Space Marine and the reason anyone thinks of the term "Pulse Rifle."
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 05:47
|
|
|
you already hit upon a great aspect which is the lighting. even moreso than the terminator movies, the lighting in aliens is just fantastic and iconic. sound design, too (remember the motion tracker beep?) those sorts of intangibles are what make the original trilogy star wars work so well too; people just wanna see and hear cool poo poo in sci fi sometimes
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 07:01
|
|
|
Aliens is basically my formative movie, it scared the dogshit out of me as a little kid and it only got better the more I understood what was going on in re-watches when I get older. Alien is also great and is the only reason we have Aliens, but I'm biased. It also helps to watch 2001 before these two because it uses the same imagery and designs and recontextualizes everything. It rejects the notion that space will improve mankind's lot, let alone that it will elevate man to the next stage of consciousness. Everyone will just have the same lovely jobs, but in space. If anything space makes it worse.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 08:24
|
|
|
mind the walrus posted:The action in Aliens is more in how much mileage they get out of the sets and costumes and tension of knowing how bad the marines are hosed. Remember a lot of this stuff was really new/novel, especially in a movie. It's still the modern benchmark for a Space Marine and the reason anyone thinks of the term "Pulse Rifle." I will admit, I was tickled by the hallway set and the creative use of foreground elements. It may not have helped that the first time I saw this story it was called "Transmorphers" Sodomy Hussein posted:It also helps to watch 2001 before these two because it uses the same imagery and designs and recontextualizes everything. It rejects the notion that space will improve mankind's lot, let alone that it will elevate man to the next stage of consciousness. Everyone will just have the same lovely jobs, but in space. If anything space makes it worse. And I think this is why it left me cold! Alien and 2001 are both so precise, there's so much depth in boring procedural motions and events, and I watch them and still feel like they're opening me up to new ideas. Aliens is retreading the same themes as Alien, but there's some greater awareness that's missing. Like, take the endings of these movies. In Alien, at the end of everything, when Ripley is on the ship alone with the alien, there's still a threat but you start to see it more as a vulnerable thing. It's quiet, it approaches Ripley unknowingly, it's basically still a baby! Maybe us people look like hosed up S&M monsters, to him. And she kills it, by blasting it into the same black expanse that's gonna take her and the rest of us in the end anyway. Aliens, while presenting the interesting conundrum where Ripley becomes the same as the Alien Queen, really hurts its own deeper meaning when it culminates in a badass mecha fight and Ripley calls her a bitch. It just takes me out of it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 16:17
|
|
|
sympathy for the dick monster
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 16:36
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:sympathy for the dick monster Yeah I've never heard anyone who viewed that showdown as "Ripley has just become her own version of the Alien Queen," or for that matter viewed the parasitic predators as sympathetic. Jaws was only acting on instinct too, but at the end of the day I'm still rooting for Quint, Brody, and Hooper.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 19:58
|
|
|
Alien is a timeless suspense masterpiece with some of the most iconic, gripping and original visuals in American cinema, and it was complemented with a uniformly fantastic ensemble cast Aliens is a really fun movie where, once again, James Cameron took an existing property and converted it into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster action movie, and he was able to accomplish this without diminishing the original, and his Cameron's casting choices were excellent (in particular, Bill Paxton and Paul Reiser were pitch-perfect) Alien Cubed suffers from being far, far less ambitious than the first two but still manages to be a half-way decent flick The one where Ripley dunks a basketball never happened, it's like that Sinbad movie where he played a genie that also never actually happened Prometheus was pretty bad and its sequel was terrible but Michael Fassbender was absolutely brilliant in them ooh, I almost forgot about the AvP movies, those are trash but the first one had a couple of gratifying fights, the only thing I remember about the second was the scene where Aliens were infecting pregnant women and using them to birth monstrosities
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 21:44
|
|
|
speaking of AvP, how many other franchises have been pitted against Aliens? I can think of the Terminator, Batman, Superman, and Judge Dredd I've never seen Alien vs Robocop but I'm sure it's happened somewhere
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 21:48
|
|
|
The late 90s saw some Green Lantern vs. Aliens which is a good match-up if I may say so: Also lol at Prometheus. That was the first time it occurred to me that some people in Hollywood aren't just having a bad day or purposefully playing to the cheap seats, but some of them really are so dumb that they mistake themselves for being really smart.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 22:11
|
|
|
Filthy Hans posted:speaking of AvP, how many other franchises have been pitted against Aliens? Green Lantern and a 90's comics team called WildC.A.T.S. got involved at one point. There is also an alien in one of the recent Mortal Kombat games. I don't know what Superman has to fear of aliens. What's fun is that the Aliens appearance in Judge Dredd is certainly canon.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 22:14
|
|
|
Sodomy Hussein posted:Green Lantern and a 90's comics team called WildC.A.T.S. got involved at one point. There is also an alien in one of the recent Mortal Kombat games. An aliens crossover also is what killed most of the Stormwatch team. It was one of the few aliens crossover comics without a handwave of 'it was all a dream' or 'this was an alternate continuity' just a straight up a big ticket team got murdered by xenomorphs.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 22:19
|
|
|
Coolness Averted posted:Yeah I've never heard anyone who viewed that showdown as "Ripley has just become her own version of the Alien Queen," or for that matter viewed the parasitic predators as sympathetic. Jaws was only acting on instinct too, but at the end of the day I'm still rooting for Quint, Brody, and Hooper. Ripley did kill a bunch of her eggs, just as the queen was about to let her go. She and her army hatched from space eggs themselves. She adopts a robot exoskeleton, embracing the machine military industrial complex brotherhood, calls her a bitch for protecting her young, and becomes one of the predator "aliens" the title advertises. More constructively, the alien in Alien is a projection of man's worst fears about himself. It's cold and unloving, is born harsh and violently, and can only communicate by killing you with a tiny mouth inside its bigger mouth. The tech and weapons are our defense against it, but also the tacit contract by which we become it. We wear rubber suits to breathe in space, this thing's gotta wear it all the time! And I'm glad those guys saved the town from jaws, but at the same time Quint's gunning for his own death
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 22:26
|
|
|
I am also now most of the way through Alien^3 and think it is excellent
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 22:49
|
|
|
Coolness Averted posted:An aliens crossover also is what killed most of the Stormwatch team. It was one of the few aliens crossover comics without a handwave of 'it was all a dream' or 'this was an alternate continuity' just a straight up a big ticket team got murdered by xenomorphs. I always forget this happened and it's weirder it's not more talked about. Late 90s comics got weird.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 23:06
|
|
|
mind the walrus posted:I always forget this happened and it's weirder it's not more talked about. Late 90s comics got weird. quote:until the August 1998 WildC.A.T.s/Aliens crossover (also written by Ellis) which saw the Stormwatch team decimated by xenomorphs (the creatures from the Alien film series). Most of the Stormwatch characters Ellis had not created were killed off in this story while the surviving characters he had created became the main cast of Ellis' new series, The Authority, lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormwatch_(comics)
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2020 23:27
|
|
|
I can't remember if it's Ellis or Ennis who everyone bitches about or maybe it's both of them I dunno, I liked Hellblazer quite a bit regardless
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2020 00:37
|
|
|
FunkyAl posted:Ripley did kill a bunch of her eggs, just as the queen was about to let her go. . It's almost like Ripley had some pretty strong pre-existing feeling about xenomorphs or something
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2020 00:46
|
|
|
Filthy Hans posted:I can't remember if it's Ellis or Ennis who everyone bitches about Ellis is sometimes doofy, but Ennis is the one we all hate. He's done some good comics but also is a gross edgelord, with some reactionary views.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2020 01:29
|
|
|
AvP is my go-to example of "too much exposition just get to the action."Sodomy Hussein posted:What's fun is that the Aliens appearance in Judge Dredd is certainly canon. Predator vs Judge Dredd vs Aliens is canon. Hell the Batman crossover where Death gets dunked on by the Scarecrow is canon. Dredd's approach to crossovers makes everybody else look like cowards.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2020 01:40
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:It's almost like Ripley had some pretty strong pre-existing feeling about xenomorphs or something Obviously, But from the alien queen's perspective Ripley was just a smaller bug who showed up and started killing her hive.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2020 14:15
|
|
|
A lot of people seem to miss or forget the whole negotiation that goes on between Ripley and the Queen. Ripley points the flame thrower at the eggs and pulls Newt close to her as if to say "let us go or the eggs get torched". Then the queen actually does tell the xenos to back off, and they do. Then Ripley has this clear moment of "gently caress this", and she burns the eggs anyway.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2020 16:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 02:25 |
|
|
hahaha flamethrower goes fwoosh
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2020 00:51
|
|